Life & Wisdom Quote by Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo turns a dark little shrug into a critique of human arrogance: you can fire the expert, but you can’t fire the illness. The line’s bite comes from its plainspoken, almost proverb-like cadence. “Even dismissing the doctor” sounds like a petty, administrative gesture - the kind a stubborn patient (or proud household) might make to reassert control. Hugo undercuts that illusion with “don’t always succeed,” a phrase that lands like a bureaucratic stamp on a cosmic truth: suffering doesn’t negotiate.

The subtext is less anti-medicine than anti-denial. Hugo lived in a century when doctors were both newly authoritative and still often powerless; treatment could be invasive, expensive, and uncertain. In that world, refusing the doctor could read as skepticism, thrift, superstition, or pride. Hugo folds all of that into a single irony: the decision to dismiss a physician may feel like agency, but it’s also a confession that the situation has outrun management. Illness becomes the one creditor you can’t ghost.

Contextually, this fits Hugo’s wider moral weather: the body is political, the private home is a stage for fate, and suffering is a relentless egalitarian. He often writes about systems - courts, churches, states - that pretend to control chaos. Here the “system” is medicine, and the chaos is the blunt fact of being “ill indeed.” The line works because it makes power look small without preaching: a clipped couplet where the human gesture is almost comic, and the consequence is not.